{"id":2408,"date":"2011-05-28T16:52:27","date_gmt":"2011-05-28T20:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2408"},"modified":"2011-07-03T19:47:17","modified_gmt":"2011-07-03T23:47:17","slug":"candidate-jack-versus-the-doubting-thomases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2408","title":{"rendered":"Candidate Jack versus the Doubting Thomases"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Big Picture Home Page<\/a> | Previous Big Picture Column<\/a> | Next Big Picture Column<\/a><\/p>\n

Candidate Jack versus the Doubting Thomases<\/h2>\n

Published in the Maryland Daily Record June 6, 2011<\/p>\n

I recently put myself through the following mental exercise: Supposing I were running for president, what would the likes of Donald Trump make of my own documentary history?\u00a0 That is, how would I fare if people took a skeptical attitude toward my own particular subset of the pool of public and semi-public documents that most of us rely upon to demonstrate who we are and what we have done?\u00a0 To my surprise, I concluded that the docu-skeptics would probably have a field day.\u00a0 I would really need to rethink whether I wanted to run.<\/p>\n

Ms. Batchelor’s Handiwork<\/h3>\n

Start with the birth certificate.\u00a0 I have one, but it is British, as my dad was Economic Attach\u00e9 at the London Embassy at the time of my birth.\u00a0 Supposing someone questioned whether I\u2019d even been born when and where I claimed.\u00a0 The Hammersmith Deputy Registrar of Births and Deaths, Freda Annie Gwendoline Batchelor (only in England!), who executed it in July 1949, is not likely among the living, and if she is, still probably wasn\u2019t in the room when I was born, and wouldn\u2019t remember a birth that far back.\u00a0 My mother and father are dead.\u00a0 I would be hard-pressed to summon a single percipient witness.<\/p>\n

Unless one is prepared to cede a certain degree of faith to Ms. Batchelor\u2019s handiwork simply because it is obviously official, there\u2019s really no basis for concluding that I was born when and where I claim.\u00a0 Let\u2019s face it, even I have no substantiating memories of my own.<\/p>\n

Then too, I\u2019d have to show that I was an American citizen.\u00a0 For that you\u2019d need my State Department Form 240, Report of Birth: Child Born Abroad of American Parent or Parents, created after a birth certificate is shown to consular personnel.\u00a0 But when doubters stopped and thought about the process that created that form, they\u2019d realize how shot through with possibilities of fraud that<\/em> was.\u00a0 To receive it, my dad didn\u2019t have to exhibit me<\/em>, just the piece of paper Ms. Batchelor signed.\u00a0 And apparently James C. Powell, Jr., the American Consul, simply took Ms. Batchelor\u2019s say-so on faith.\u00a0 If someone were trying to manufacture a bogus American identity for a child, this would have been an ideal moment.\u00a0 And of course Mr. Powell is no more likely to be among the living than Ms. Batchelor.<\/p>\n

With the birth certificate and the Form 240, it\u2019s not even necessary to show that the documents are forgeries to sow the seeds of doubt.\u00a0 All you have to do is raise a question whether the people who created them knew what they were doing.\u00a0 Genuine document, but not necessarily genuine me<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Keeping It Unreal With Photoshop<\/h3>\n

What about my subsequent history?\u00a0 Well, of course there are still people who remember me from my school days.\u00a0 But what about my grades?\u00a0 (You may recall that there have been suggestions that our President lacked the grades to get into the elite institutions of higher learning from which he graduated.)\u00a0 I don\u2019t know whether my grade school, which still exists, maintains its own records going back to the 1950s.\u00a0 But I\u2019m quite skeptical that anyone could locate grade records from my non-public high school, which closed its doors forever the year after I graduated.\u00a0 I could probably scrounge up some old report cards and a transcript from my family\u2019s files, but they could be forgeries.<\/p>\n

As we get closer to my present, authentication of both the documents and their contents grows progressively easier \u2013 but only, I think, because computer records start to exist side-by-side with paper records.\u00a0 That is, I have a contemporaneous law school transcript and<\/em> the law school computers would probably confirm its contents.<\/p>\n

Oddly, though, as we get further into the computer era, such double-confirmation becomes less available.\u00a0 As records increasingly become nothing but<\/em> computer entries, as we leave paper behind, our records can command no greater faith than do the underlying computers.\u00a0 And we know or fear that computers can be hacked or gamed, or simply fail.\u00a0 That is, for instance, one reason computer voting machines inspire such discomfort.\u00a0 And this was apparently the problem with Obama\u2019s short-form birth certificate: that it was essentially a computer printout.<\/p>\n

And even when there is a satisfactory-looking paper document, we all know that amazing things can be done with Photoshop.\u00a0 So there\u2019s some basis for anxiety even if the documents seem to confirm what the computers say.<\/p>\n

Fromage Vert<\/h3>\n

The end result, as this little experiment with my own history demonstrates, is that there is some basis to distrust just about anything.\u00a0 Skepticism about public records and their non-public near-equivalents (private-school transcripts, baptismal records, newspaper announcements and the like), these records we live by, is not entirely irrational.<\/p>\n

What is irrational is losing all sense of perspective, and not resigning oneself to treating public documents with some quantum of trust.\u00a0 True, utter certainty is not attainable now, any more than it ever was.\u00a0 (Surely it happened from time to time in the Middle Ages that someone faked the king\u2019s seal.)\u00a0 And maybe Ms. Batchelor and my parents really were in on a plot to pass off a British child as American.\u00a0 And maybe the moon really is made of green cheese.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, if you truly believe the moon is a mere morceau de fromage vert<\/em>, I\u2019m sorry to have to tell you you have a screw loose.\u00a0 You lack the judgment to perceive when the theoretically possible is overwhelmingly unlikely.\u00a0 The recent flap over the President\u2019s back story is of that order.\u00a0 Of course the theoretical possibility exists, and can never be eliminated, that Obama\u2019s entire identity and history is a fabrication.\u00a0 But acting as if it were remotely likely is the sign of some kind of willed lack of judgment.<\/p>\n

Right in the Eye<\/h3>\n

It is no doubt tempting to lose oneself in such a game of make-believe, all the more so because we are all lied to so regularly.\u00a0 But lies of that sort don\u2019t usually infect multiple ancient public records.\u00a0 These are actually among the more reliable guideposts.\u00a0 And obviously the more lies those records are supposed to conceal, like the slew of them that would have had to be involved in the President\u2019s supposed alternative history (born in Kenya, dual citizen, academic underachiever who was somehow smuggled into Columbia and Harvard), the crazier it is to entertain such a notion.<\/p>\n

Worse, a determined skepticism about public records hurts us all.\u00a0 Aggressively pushing the view that all documents are forgeries, all history is made up, and anyone who says otherwise is a patsy or a traitor, damages a part of the commons, the social infrastructure.\u00a0 Public records are a legacy from each generation to its successors.\u00a0 Our parents and our ancestors went to a lot of effort to bequeath us tangible evidence of who we are and where we came from.\u00a0 Birther madness spits right in the eye of the old archivists, insults them for their trouble, and devalues their contributions.<\/p>\n

It is hard enough to know who we are, as individuals and as a people.\u00a0 Hence, unless there are strong reasons for not doing so, we should greet the help we\u2019ve received with some gratitude, not the third degree.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

The Big Picture Home Page<\/a> | Previous Big Picture Column<\/a> | Next Big Picture Column<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just because I\u2019ve spent my whole life being \u201cme,\u201d that\u2019s no reason for anyone to believe it, no reason at all. Vigilant, patriotic Americans recognize that all documents are forgeries, all history is made up, and anyone who says otherwise is a patsy or a traitor. Since in a digital age, the technology exists to fake anything, it follows that the technology has been used to fake everything. Watchful Americans recognize this inescapable logic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2786,2788,2787],"class_list":["post-2408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-donald-trump","tag-public-records"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2408"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2414,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2408\/revisions\/2414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}